Restorative Justices for Teenager and Sentences Assignment | Essay Help Services

I want an essay that has MLA format and with 3 pages more than 850 words and also the topic should be about criminal justices for teenagers and their sentencesOakland Demonstrates Right Way to Use Restorative
Justice With Teens
By Lara Bazelon
Posted on January 3, 2019
Restorative justice is a centuries-old approach that seeks to empower people to
address the harms, needs and obligations that arise when a crime has been
committed by bringing together victims, offenders and members of their respective
communities. The face-to-face open dialogue process is focused on personal
accountability and reparations; it is achieved when victims and offenders share
deeply personal and painful life experiences with the least likely person in the
world — each other. Restorative justice requires its participants to lay bare feelings
of self-loathing, suffering, rage, loneliness, rejection that they have hidden from the
world and often from themselves. They must face reckonings they have long
resisted.
The Anglo-American legal system, which is fundamentally adversarial, asks three
basic questions: What law was broken, who broke it and what punishment is
deserved? Restorative justice, which focuses on rebuilding lives and communities,
asks three similar questions in a radically different way: Who was harmed, what are
their needs and whose obligation is it to meet those needs?
Much has been said about the failures of the American criminal justice system: the
mass incarceration, particularly of young men of color; the lasting legal stigma
upon release; the decimation of families by crime and by the loss of their young
men to prison; high recidivism rates; the sidelining and alienation of victims.
Restorative justice recognizes the failures of that system and aims to correct them
through the active involvement and empowerment of those harmed most directly,
group broadly defined as victims, offenders, their family members and others in the
community.
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The United States, with its emphasis on retribution and punishment, has been slow
to embrace restorative justice. Still, it has a foothold in isolated parts of the country,
particularly when it comes to seeking alternatives for youth to the school-to-prison
pipeline.
In California, the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) had instituted restorative
justice programs in nearly half its schools by 2014 in collaboration with the
nonprofit Restorative Justice Oakland Youth (RJOY), in reaction to an alarmingly
high suspension rate among its black and Latino students. In healing circles,
students who had committed offenses had to face the students they harmed, their
parents and other community members.
WHAT HAPPENED TO CEDRIC IN CIRCLE
In 2013, Cedric, an African American 16-year-old, was required to participate in a
restorative justice circle as a condition of his acceptance into Oakland’s Bunche
Continuing Education High School. He had just spent 10 months in a juvenile justice
camp for bringing a loaded gun to his previous school, which went off in the middle
of class. Cedric’s receptivity to the restorative justice circle weighed heavily in
deciding whether to admit him to Bunche.
Cedric freely admitted that he was unhappy about having to sit in a circle with his
parents, the school’s principal, a psychologist, teachers and peer mentors to talk
about the pain he had caused other people or the deprivation and harm he had
experienced himself. The prospect, Cedric said, “made me feel like walking out the
damn room.” But he did it.
As with most circles, a “talking piece” was passed around the room; only the person
holding it could speak. As Cedric, his mother and his stepfather spoke, it became
clear that Cedric felt driven to commit crimes to provide his mother, who could not
find a job, with money to pay the rent. “I probably wouldn’t be into this if she wasn’t
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struggling,” Cedric said, “I just did it because my family needed it.” In talking about
her own struggles, Cedric’s mother broke down in tears. Cedric swiped clumsily and
repeatedly at his own eyes.
Over and over, when it was their turn, the adults in the room told Cedric they loved
him and supported him, urging him to accept their help and tell them what he
needed to do better. Eric Butler, who facilitated the circle and worked as RJOY’s
school coordinator at Bunche High School, addressed Cedric directly, saying, “I will
be your brother, I will be your uncle, I got your back. I got stuff for you. Come and get
it. And I say this in front of everybody because if I don’t, I need all these people to
hold me accountable.”
In the closing round of the circle, Butler led the group in writing out a life plan for
Cedric on a whiteboard, and the group agreed to reconvene in 30 days. Butler said,
“Next time we meet, we gonna celebrate.” When I spoke to Butler about Cedric four
years later, Butler told me that Cedric had been admitted to Bunche, had graduated
and was now working in the construction industry.
‘COOKIE-CUTTER APPROACH’ WON’T WORK
The use of restorative justice as an alternative to traditional discipline in
disadvantaged public high schools has its critics. In schools across the country,
teachers have publicly protested, stating that the programs were not well-designed
or consistently applied, leaving the worst-behaved students to believe, correctly,
they could physically and verbally abuse their peers and teachers without suffering
any real consequence. In such an unsafe and disruptive environment, they said, real
learning was more difficult than ever.
Fania E. Davis, the co-founder and co-executive director of RJOY, says, “there must
be a mindful, rigorous approach to implementation. We have seen cases where a
school district will decide to stop suspending students and use restorative justice
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but they haven’t created an infrastructure or trained the right people to come in and
oversee the work.” It cannot be, she says, a “cookie-cutter approach” but rather has
to be a process that grows organically from the ground up. “In Oakland,” she says,
“we started at just one school” putting together general practices and tailoring them
to meet the particular needs of other schools in the district.
In January 2015, the OUSD announced that it would incorporate restorative justice
practices into all its schools by 2020 based on results of the participating schools,
which showed sharp drops in truancy and suspensions while test scores and
graduation rates rose as much as 60 percent. Davis says RJOY “worked ourselves
out of a job.”
Her nonprofit is now focused on implementing a strategic plan approved years
earlier by judges, prosecutors, public defenders, court personnel and probation
officers to convert the Alameda County, Calif., juvenile justice system entirely to a
restorative system, similar to the one that exists in New Zealand. A less ambitious
model exists in other parts of the country such as Boulder, Colo., and North Bend,
Ore., where police and prosecutors are using restorative justice practices as an
alternative to juvenile court in specific cases.
Lara Bazelon is the author of the book “ Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice
After Wrongful Conviction ”; this was adapted from a chapter in her book. She is an
associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where she is
the director of the Criminal and Juvenile Justice Clinic and the Racial Justice
Clinic .
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